Facebook today has seems to have disabled the Suggest to Friends button. It appears from pages that you do not own, the link is completely missing. As of right now though, for pages that you are the administrator on, the link is still there, but is not currently functioning. It is not known currently if this is a temporary thing that Facebook has done, or if it is more permanent.

The button was a great tool for getting people to suggest your page and send out invites, and it was also a very easy way to invite your friends and family to your pages in order to get some seeder fans on your page so it wasn’t completely empty. It was however, in recent months used by many who were selling Facebook fans as a 3rd party source. The disabling / removal of this button could be to cut back on that activity.

While buying Facebook fans from 3rd parties wasn’t very productive for lead generation, it did have some use. The useful thing was to gain some initial fans so that your pages did not look blank or like they had no activity on them. After all, who wants to join a page with 10 fans, people would much rather join a page that has hundreds or thousands on it.

Question: What do you think of this new feature? Do you think that this will be temporary or is a permanent thing?

While social media marketing may be relatively new in the internet marketing world, it is starting to make a rapid impact on other areas of online marketing, including SEO rankings. While this has been speculated for quite some time, recently both Bing and Google have acknowledged that they are considering social factors into their algorithms for the SERPS.

Users have been reporting this for months now, and I began to actually notice it back in the summer of 2010 on my own projects, and the results have only grown. Taking a site that I had, I went for the typical SEO methods for gaining higher rankings. I built up backlinks, provided lots of link bait, and I actually ended up with higher quality, and a larger quantity of links than my competition. I also tweaked my site for other factors considered important for SEO, and I was still being outranked by my competitor. The only difference that could be found at all was the number of Facebook fans that our respective sites had. While both of us had a large number, the competitions number was 5 times what mine was. I analyzed everything possible, and this was the only factor I could find that he was actually better than me at.

While this seems to most SEOs like one of the smaller ranking factors, it actually makes a lot of logical sense in this day and age. Think of it this way, if you have 2 sites that you visit and both seem similar, and one has 500 fans, and the other one has 50,000, which one are you going to consider to be the more authoritative site? The answer is rather obvious. Go beyond that to Twitter, say you have 2 similar articles from 2 different sites being tweeted out, but 1 of the articles gets tweeted 1,000 times vs the other getting tweeted 10 times. Which site is more important in your eyes?

At the end of the day, even if there WERE no SEO benefits to your business by venturing into Social Media, the fact remains, there are over 500 million people on Facebook, another 200 Million on Twitter and another estimated 300 Million accounts on YouTube. If your business isn’t in front of all of these eyes already, you should be developing a strategy to take advantage of this mass audience.

As I reported recently, MySpace did indeed let go of just about 50% of its workforce, laying off 500 people. With that done, it seems that MySpace is undergoing even further restructuring. In addition to a big shake up it would appear that News Corp, the MySpace owners that also own Fox, are looking for some potential buyers. The interested party? Yahoo.

I would venture to guess that anyone at this point who is interested in purchasing MySpace would be getting a bargain price on it, as the site has been on a fast track downwards, declining at what seems like a faster pace than even Facebooks incline in growth. One of the larger questions now becomes, what would one do with MySpace if they were to buy it? Can the site even begin to be saved?

The expenses and the overhaul of the site that is needed to slow the pace of its death is enormous. The manpower and money that would be needed to revive the site to even a fraction of what it wants was in its best days would be even larger. Is Yahoo a company that can pull this off, or is it going to be yet another property that they pick up and accelerate its demise?

Huffington Post is currently reporting that there are rumblings going on inside MySpace that they may be cutting down on their work force by 30-50%. This doesn’t come as a huge shocker considering in the past few months MySpace owners, News Corp, have made it very clear that big changes need to happen with the site to keep it running.

Just a few weeks ago, MySpace teamed up with the Black Eyed Peas to launch their new look, which I was excited about, but quickly lost excitement when I went to the site. I will confess, I didn’t even log in to see what all of the fuss was about, it was like they changed up the logo and called it a day.

MySpace doesn’t ask for my advice, but I am going to solicit it anyway. If MySpace wants to have ANY shot at continuing on and stopping its rather rapid death it is going to need a COMPLETE make over. Delete the whole site from the servers, keep the databases, and start over. Get rid of customized profiles, get ride of the sparkly graphics that have always looked like they were straight from 1991, and delete EVERYONE’S 1 billion music players that they have running on their pages. The profiles didn’t load well 5 years ago, and they still don’t, even with advances in computers.

MySpace has a lot of work if it wants to turn things around, it will be a hard task, but it isn’t possible, it has a MASSIVE email list that with the right redesign of the site, and honestly re functioning of it, they could email all of their users and have them back on the bandwagon, so to speak.

Anyone here still have a MySpace account that they use? What do you think of MySpace getting rid of some workers, did you see this coming?

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